A technical achievement more in my line, though just as difficult for me to follow as the vast conception of the Dnieprostroy construction had been, was Leon Theremin’s ether-wave instrument, which I got to know in Moscow in the spring of 1928. I stumbled upon Theremin on the stage of the Moscow Conservatory Hall one afternoon when I went there to rehearse. The shy young scientist was busy assembling his incredibly intricate instrument with its countless wire connections (or whatever one calls them). We were introduced to each other and I listened (somewhat incredulously, I admit) to my pianist’s claims of what Professor Theremin’s magical-looking contraption could do. It was said to produce- or, rather, to capture out of the ether, by “controlled static”- musical sounds of an almost unlimited scale and of an infinite variety of timbres, linked together with a legato beyond the scope of the human singing apparatus and, still more, beyond the capacity of bowed instruments. Also, it was endowed with a vibrato like a string instrument or human song – and all this without strings, without fingerboard, without sounding board, simply by moving one’s hands in front of the two metal bars projecting from the instrument, one of which controlled pitch and the other volume. The claims sounded fantastic to me to a degree difficult to realize now, after an interval of some eighteen years, when one takes the theremin as a matter of course, along with thereminists like Lucie Bigelow Rosen, Clara Rockmore, and others, and theremin concerti with orchestral accompaniment and the like. I of course would not rest until I got Theremin to play me a few snatches of melody and, immediately, I tried my hand, or rather my hands, at it myself, with somewhat dire acoustic results. << less